It was then he drew himself slowly away, moving with the stealth and caution of one to whom freedom from discovery meant a great deal. Not until the cabin was fully between him and those he had spied upon did he rise to his feet. This movement was slow and brought a gasp of pain from him. He did not stand straight. His shoulders were bent. He was hatless and ragged and his arms and breast were half stripped of clothing. In his hand he carried a heavy stick, and with this stick he helped himself to walk as he struck out in the moonlight.
He tried to hurry, but at best his progress was not fast, and to make up for lack of speed he kept the cabin between him and the two from whom he was running away. In the shadow of a second cabin he stopped to rest, breathing deeply, as if what he had accomplished had cost him great effort. One at a time he passed the dwellings in the settlement and made his way across the green open to the little log church. Here he rested for a longer period, and in these moments he noted with satisfaction that trees threw a deep and continuous shadow between him and the edge of the forest.
The door of Father Albanel's church was never locked and after a little he opened it and entered. But he bolted it carefully behind him. Then he groped his way through the moonlit seats and opened a window. After that he found the rope which rang the bell.
Never in its history had Five Fingers roused itself to the ringing of the bell as it was rung tonight. It was not the Sabbath message. It was not Father Albanel's sweet, slow tolling of peace on earth and good will toward men, nor was it the sad and slumberous requiem for the dead. It was, instead, a wild exultation, an almost savage triumph, a pealing alarm that called upon every soul in the settlement to rise up in instant wakefulness. It filled the forest until its notes beat one upon another and the hills and ridges caught them up and flung them back as they had never done before. Men rose out of their sleep and stumbled for matches; a light appeared here, another there, and still the bell continued to ring until not a cabin in Five Fingers remained in darkness.
Not until then did the man who had rung the bell drop from the window of the little church and steal through the shadows of the trees into the forest. There he did not pause but went on with the slowness of either age or exhaustion until he was swallowed in the deeper secrecy of the woods.
Pierre Gourdon came first out into the night, bareheaded and in his shirt-sleeves, and in front of his cabin he found Mona ahead of him with her long hair streaming down her back and a strange man's arms tightly about her. Almost fiercely he tore them apart—and then he saw it was Peter.
Jame Clamart came running up a moment later, and it was Jame who first sent the news abroad in a shout which, next to the mad ringing of the bell, was the wildest thing ever heard in Five Fingers between the hour of midnight and one o'clock in the morning.
"Peter McRae has come back!" he yelled. "Peter McRae—has—come—back!"
Swifter almost than men could travel word passed that this was the reason for the ringing of the bell—Peter McRae had come home after two years, and Father Albanel, or some other, had wakened them from their sleep to welcome him.